BC Conservation Areas Data - The Land Trust Alliance

Conservation partners have collaborated for a number of years as part of the British Columbia Nongovernmental Organization (BC NGO) Conservation Areas Database Working Group to develop a comprehensive, standardized inventory of British Columbia’s non-governmental conservation areas (also known as private conservation lands). These areas include properties designated as Fee Simple, Registerable Interests, and Unregisterable Interests and complement the inventories created by the Federal and Provincial Governments for federal and provincial protected areas. The BC NGO Conservation Areas Database was developed from cadastral mapping of legal parcels by local governments. The attributes of each conservation parcel were populated with information obtained from the conservation partners as well as by searching land titles.

Technical development of the database is led by the Technical Working Group, namely Ducks Unlimited Canada, The Nature Trust of British Columbia and the Canadian Wildlife Service of Environment Canada. Project direction and coordination is led by the General Working Group members, which in addition to the Technical Working Group includes the Nature Conservancy of Canada and The Land Trust Alliance of British Columbia. The conservation areas of nearly fifty conservation organizations are included in the database. The conservation parcels are produced with the cooperation of the Integrated Cadastral Information Society, which is coordinating the development of a standardized legal parcel fabric among British Columbia’s local governments, utilities, assessment office, land titles office, and the Provincial Government. Some small land trusts have chosen not to participate in this project. Their total conservation area currently amounts to 26 hectares and represents 19 properties.

The Annual British Columbia Conservation Areas Summary provides the most accurate identification of total conservation area in BC.